Stop explaining your offer – and start selling it. Here's how. (Ep#25)

You’ve built the thing. It’s brilliant. But the words wrapped around it? They’re not doing it justice.
In this episode of The Upside Up Marketing Podcast, I’m unpacking the most common messaging trap even seasoned founders fall into — and why your sales page might be leaking conversions, even if it looks flawless.
You’ll learn why leading with logic rarely lands, and how one simple shift in your copy can change everything from “let me think about it” to “when can we start?”

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MENTIONED IN THIS VIDEO: 
👉 Jay Acunzo “What if you could whisper?” - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayacunzo/
🟠 Ready for offers that sell before you speak? If you're done explaining, convincing, and carrying the whole sale on your shoulders – it’s time to build a message that does the work for you.
Inside The Perfect Fit, we go deep to craft a magnetic message and offer so aligned, your content becomes a filter – drawing in pre-sold clients who already feel like a yes.
✨ If that sounds like the shift you’re craving, connect with me on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/katie-spreadbury and send me a message. I’ll send the details your way.

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🧡 Enjoyed this episode? Why not share it to your social media and tag me @orangesheepkatie – here’s the link: https://youtu.be/TVQaAuhPD4s 

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When you’re ready, here are three ways I can help you get faster results: 
SUBSCRIBE to "The Upside-Up Marketing Podcast here on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts 
DOWNLOAD your "Ideal Client Anti-Avatar" to help you focus on the things that DO matter, forget the things that don't - and how to tell which is which: www.orangesheepresearch.co.uk/anti 
WORK WITH ME: Your offer’s great. Your clients love you once they’re in. But getting them there? Still feels like hard work. Let’s change that.
The Perfect Fit is where we craft messaging so sharp, your content does the filtering, and dreamy clients come pre-sold. Slide into my DMs on LinkedIn if you're ready: www.linkedin.com/in/katie-spreadbury


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Connect with me on socials: 
➡️LinkedIn (the best place to find me): https://www.linkedin.com/in/katie-spreadbury 
➡️Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/orangesheepresearch 
➡️Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/orangesheepkatie 

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TIMESTAMPS ⏱️
00:00 Welcome to The Upside Up Marketing Podcast
02:07 Teaching My Son to Make Tea
04:33 The More Expert You Are, The More Likely You Are To Do This
05:47 Case Studies: Dove and Airbnb
08:43 The Explain to Convince Trap
12:02 The Echo Effect: Mirroring Your Client's Voice
14:39 Actionable Advice: Test Your Sales Page
15:26 Conclusion: Keep Your Messaging Upside Up

You can download your complimentary guide to "Three Techniques to Validate Your Offer Before You Launch" here: https://www.orangesheepresearch.co.uk/validate

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Transcript

0:00

Today's episode is for the founder, the business owner, who is tired of questioning their brilliant offer because the messaging keeps falling flat. So if you have a sales page, which is polished, but not pulling content that feels clear but is not converting. If your audience says they love you, but nobody's buying, watch on because this is for you. Today, I want to talk about one of the most common traps that I see people fall into when they're talking about their offers and. Um, this is especially true of people who are absolute experts in their field. As the ideal client whisperer, I make it my job to hear what other people miss. And the better you are at what you do at your thing, the easier this one is to miss, I'm afraid. So, if you are a real expert and you are struggling to get other people to see how brilliant you are, um, with your business, with the thing you have to offer them, this is for you. Oh, and do stick around till the end.'cause I'm gonna give you a very simple exercise so that you can test this yourself on your page. Welcome to The Upside Up Marketing podcast. Using marketing to persuade people to buy your thing is hard, icky, and not an effective use of your time. It's an upside down way of doing things. Introducing upside up marketing, helping you create offers people want to buy and share them in a way that feels good. All over a nice cup of tea. Add the vibe check here. Welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome to the Upside Up Marketing Podcast. If we have not met before, my name is Katie Spreadbury. I'm the ideal client whisperer and I help businesses who are marketing online find the right words to really connect with their ideal clients, the people they want to work with the most. The people they most want to buy their thing. I help them to create offers that people actually want to buy. I help my clients market these in a way that doesn't fall into that convincing and persuading energy, but rather just connects and shows people why this is the best option for them. So that's the angle I'm coming at this week when I'm talking to you, um, on this episode about this messaging trap and about this, um, gap that there may be and the way you are explaining your offers and the way people need to hear them. But lemme just tell you first about an absolute parenting win I've had this week'cause I just want to celebrate this and share this with the world. This is massive and I know like people don't like people as a gloat about their children, but I mean, this is huge. I have taught my son. How to make a cup of tea. And he makes a really good cup of tea as well. Ah, brilliant. What a day. It feels like a real milestone. But anyway, the other day he even made me a tea and my husband a coffee and brought them to us while we were still in bed. I mean, what a fantastic life has been transformed. I just hope that he continues to find this exciting and doesn't get bored of it within a week because it's epic. Um, but when I was explaining to him how to make the cup of tea, how much milk to put in, you know, just the dash, um, I was reminded of the first time that, um. My mom left me on my own to fend for myself, um, as a teenager. And, uh, I had to, I decided I fancied some scrambled eggs, so, um, I gave her a ring, walked over to the wall where the phone was picked the phone up, dialed the number, you know, old school and, uh, mom, how'd you make scrambled egg? She said, oh, you throw the egg in the saucepan with some butter and milk and just like stare it till it's done. Okay, mum, but how much butter? Oh, a knob of butter. How, how much milk Mom a, a splash of milk. Okay. How do I know when it's done? Well, it's just done, isn't it? Okay, thanks, mom. I'll, I'll give it a go. It was, she knew perfectly well what she was saying. She knew exactly what she meant by another butter. She knew exactly what she meant by a splash of milk because she just does it on instinct. She's cooked scrambled eggs so many times in her life that she could just. You know, whack it all together, out comes perfect scrambled eggs. But for a 14-year-old me who had never cooked an egg in her life before, it wasn't quite enough. It didn't translate. I, in this instance, I needed her to be more specific about what she meant by those measurements. In a way that like, related to things I know about. So like another of butter, about the same size as, uh, um, I dunno, A fat after eight min, I'm trying to think what, what would be about right now. Um, a splash of milk. Oh yeah. About the same amount you put in tea. Maybe a little bit more if you've used three eggs, you know, something that I could relate to and that made sense in the context of my world, which isn't what she had given me. And that sort of disconnect. A good illustration of that trap that I was talking about that I see experts fall into all the time. I've just been doing a few, sales page audits for people and, um, it's amazing how much it comes up and I probably do it myself sometimes as well,'cause it really hard to avoid. And like I say, the more you know about what you do, the more likely you are to do this. Like, you know, your offer is fantastic and you've built a beautiful sales page that explains everything about it. You've got all the reasons it works, all the reasons. It's so fantastic. All the logic of, you know, sort of why it would be the right choice for them. The process you go to, the psychology, the logistics, all of this, it's all down there. It explains perfectly. And you think, how could anyone read that are not by this offer? You know, it's clearly fantastic. But when we lead with. Explanation with an explaining energy, with the all the logistics, the words, the why, the how, and things like that. We're marketing from our head, not their heart. Okay? We're marketing from our head, not their heart, and that's when that connection drops out. The thing to understand is that against all logic, people aren't buying because they understand why your offer's good. They're buying because they feel understood. A famous example that demonstrates this really well is Dove's Real Beauty campaign. Now, if you are in the uk, you will probably be familiar with this. When Dove really went against the grain and stopped using these perfect, idealistic, slim, beautiful. Classic example of beauty models, like everything every other skincare brand was doing and started using real people of all shapes, all sizes, all backgrounds, normal women, real women, like what people are actually like. The success of that campaign was Dove showing a whole underserved group of the population. Regular women that they were there with them, they were for them. It made them feel seen, it made them feel valued and it made them feel that dove was the kind of thing someone like them would use. And that was so, so powerful and it become such a famous campaign and it's still what Dove do today it made them feel that Dove is for people like me. And that is such a powerful psychological lever you can pull when you're doing your marketing. Um, another example, more recent one. I saw an advert for Airbnb where, it was, uh, like everyone knows what Airbnb is, they know that they have the flexibility to choose any type of property, you know, anywhere in the country, the world really these days. And, um, you know what Airbnb is, but when you're, when you're going on holiday, when you're going to stay away, just like for a weekend in a city or something like that, it's not necessarily the first thing you think of. What Airbnb did with this, advertising campaign, I'm gonna pick on one specific advert that really stood out to me, but there were several was, made the case for why choosing Airbnb would be better than just doing the easy thing of going to a hotel. And that is they said for parents, like they showed in a hotel, your bedtime is when the baby goes to bed. So if your small child goes to bed at 6:30 PM you kind of have to as well. If you're in the same hotel room as them, the lights have to go down. You have to whisper and hush tones to each other. You know, if you want to eat, you have to do it absolutely silently. Um, it's really, really hard to stay in a hotel room with a small child or a baby. Airbnb. You can book a place where the baby's got their own room and you can. You know, you put the baby to bed and you can stay up and enjoy your evening. In the place where you are on holiday or on your break away, it recognized a problem that, um, you just sort of, you know, you take it for granted. As a parent, if you're going away and you're staying in a hotel, this is something that's gonna happen. People, might not even considered. There was another option. It recognized the problem, what was happening. It's um, it called it out. It made people feel seen, and then it offered an alternative. Solve the problem. And I thought that was a really, really powerful advert. Um, so it's showing people, it's making them feel seen and understood, not just saying, oh, Airbnb is great. You can like, get any type of property you want, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And explaining the logic, it showed people why it was so good for them. So I call this the explain to convince trap. Um. And the bad news is, like I say, the more expert you are at your thing, the better you are at what you do. The, the more like you are to fall into it, and it's not so much a messaging problem'cause your positioning might be right. It's more a language gap. So your offer is built from your experience and your words are still filtered through this expertise. And I'm not even talking necessarily about using jargon and you know, the very basic things you know, you should avoid. I mean, just generally, the why, the what, and whatever. It's all coming through your knowledge and your expertise. You are speaking like the expert, but the buyer is hearing you like a beginner. They're not fluent in your framework. They are fluent in their own frustration. So when you lead with a proven method for content clarity, for example, what they hear is another expert telling me what I already know and still can't fix. That's not just something to improve. It's that silent conversion leak that's showing up everywhere. Fewer clicks on your sales page. Dms that never turn into clients calls the end in, I need to think about it or Let me get back to you on that. Evergreen funnels that stay pretty quiet. Uh, and the worst part, because your offer is good, you assume the problem must be your price or the sort of the funnel you've set up. Or even your entire positioning. So you rewrite it, you repackage it, you rebuild it again and again and again. But the truth is, it was never the offer, it was the words that were wrapped around the offer. So when you're looking at your sales page, wondering what you've missed, wondering what else you can put in there to help people understand why this is such a great offer. When your frustration tells you to throw the whole thing out the window and start again, that's not you being dramatic. That is, you know, like those old style radios. Um. Like nowadays, you can just get your radio on your app, can't you? But you know the old style radios and you've got two dials on them, haven't you? You've got the one that does the tuning to find the radio station and you've got the one that does the volume Well, when you put your offer out there, if your people are only hearing the static, they're trying to find the signal. They need you to turn the tuner to find, you know, the, the connection between you and them. But you've only ever been taught to turn up the volume, because that's what most classic marketing is, isn't it? Post more, be in more places, say more, shout more, be more, you know, stand out more. Shouting at them louder isn't gonna solve anything. Louder static. If anything is more annoying than background static, they'll turn that radio off and they're gonna walk away. Um, Jay Acunzo has a great quote and I recommend you look him up. Um, I'll put a link in the show notes to his podcast. But one of the best things that he says that really gives me food for thought is what if you could whisper. What if your message was so good you didn't have to shout? What if you could whisper? Just keep that in mind.'cause that is what you want to be getting at with your sales page. That is how on point you want those words to be. So what's the fix? How do we do this? Well, we flip the focus from, how do I describe what I do to, what are they already saying and how do I echo that back? Stop trying to explain what you do and start listening to what your clients are already telling you. This is the shift from marketer to whisperer, from broadcasting value to mirroring truth. And this is like the framework that I use to work with my clients. I call it the echo effect. Um, and the echo effect helps you hear your clients so that your messaging sounds like them, not just intellectually, but emotionally. So they feel that connection. They feel it when they're reading your content, your copy, your sales page, it's not about starting with your own brilliance, which is the natural thing to do when you are writing. Any kind of copy to sell yourself to people. We're not starting with your brilliance. We're starting with the buyer's voice. Okay? We're starting from their own head, from where they're at.'cause that is what's gonna catch their attention. That is what's gonna turn their head. That is what's gonna make them read on, because when your message mirrors their lived experience, they don't need convincing. They just feel seen. And that takes you far closer to that, yes, it builds trust. Trust that you understand them. Therefore, your offer is gonna be a fit for them because it's been designed for them.'cause you get them, you know what they need. That you'll be able to help them achieve their goals. And that you are gonna have mitigated for any speed bumps that come up along the way, get this right and your conversion becomes a quiet inevitability. It's so much more powerful. So if your last launch fell flat, if your content is smart, but it's not sticking, then maybe it's not a strategy problem. Maybe it's not even a positioning problem. Maybe it's that you are fluent in your language of the expert, but your client needs you to be speaking in their native language, in the language of their mind, in the language of their heart. And like I said, that's exactly what I do with my clients inside the perfect fit. It's not. Funnel tweak, it's not a messaging fix. It is a listening method that rebuilds your messaging from your client's truth, okay? From where they're at. And it doesn't matter whether they are right or wrong about what is causing their problem, what's going wrong for them. You know what matters is what they know about it, what they know to be true. And you need to be meeting them at that point and guiding them through. Don't assume they already have the map, okay? Don't assume they already have the map. You need to bring them there. So I've got a mini action for you today. This is something I want you to take away and I want you to do, I want you to call up your sales page for your main offer. So the one that's the most important to you. And, look at, find one sentence on that page. So maybe your big promise, maybe your hook, maybe your headline, maybe like that big one. That'd be the most obvious one to go for. And ask yourself, does it sound like you are explaining your method? Or does it sound like your ideal client? Mid scroll thinking, oh my gosh, this is exactly what I have been saying to myself. Which of those is it closer to? If it's the first, tweak it. And if it's the second, then well done because you're already speaking in their language. If you're not sure. Connect me on LinkedIn, drop me a message. I'll have a look and, uh, let you know what I think it is. Um, but yeah, if this episode just a short and sweet one today, if this episode has landed for you, then why not share it with a friend who is spiraling in and yet another sales page re write. Um, and don't forget to like, follow, subscribe, whatever it is on the platform you're watching or listening on. Um, I've got more messaging micro moves for you coming your way next time around. Um, until then, keep your messaging upside up and I will see you next time.